Assignment 5 - Juliana Paolone

 “Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop” is my meme of choice because of it’s relevance to me being a student as well as hard-working noble citizen in a country that prides itself on its freedom. The sarcastic undertone of the meme caption reading “Don’t mind me, just watering my hippies” laid over the evidently serious photo of a police officer pepper spraying defenseless students contributes heavily to its popularity upon first glance. Students, more so student activists, have the reputation to be very active in the world wide web so it’s a no-brainer that a photo where student protesters appearing to receive false treatment blew up quickly. When you’re dealing with an incident that resulted in such actions as law-suits and media criticism to reports in the British press, the time-frame for the popularity of the meme increased immediately from the date it was taken on November 19th, 2011. The surfaced photo of officer Lt. John Pike walking down the line of students linked at arms spraying pepper spray due to their refusal to vacate the area was instantly photoshopped onto other culturally popular photos and settings implying the exaggerated brutality on innocence. Examples of such photos include Officer Pike laid over such figures like Martin Luther King Jr., Ghandi, and General Grant to exaggerate the brutality of innocence. 

Assignment 4 - Dating in Berkeley

Here is the story of young Brogene and his quest to find a mate amidst the various types of women at Berkeley.

Assignment 5 - Elana Hanen

The Condescending Wonka

The Condescending Wonka meme is a photo of actor Gene Wilder in the 1971 musical Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. The captions on the meme can be characterized as patronizing and sarcastic. The earliest known image of the creepy Wonka face was on Quickmeme with the caption “Close the door / I’ll show my my fudge packing unit” on March 2nd, 2011. Later that day it was posted on Reddit and the rapid Internet spread began.  On October 12th, 2011, The Bigster blog posted a compilation of Creepy Wonka derivatives.  Creepy Wonka macros have since spread to FunnyJunk and the Condescending Wonka macros can be found on Tumblr.  I believe that this gained so much popularity because the contrast of an innocent and timeless movie with the photo of a creepy old man making a provocative statement is definitely going to attract Internet traffic.  With its rapid spread, there are many more memes of the Wonka face with sarcastic statements such as “Oh you are an independent woman?/Tell me more while you make me a sandwhich.” 

Assignment 5 - Helene Inselseth

Chuck Norris facts

Chuck Norris facts are satirical facts about the actor Chuck Norris that started appearing on the Internet the summer of 2005. This was a result of a thread on the SomethingAwful forums, where people started posting their “Vin Diesel Facts” in response to the movie “The Pacifier”. The “Vin Diesel Fact Generaotor” was a page allowing people to make and post such facts, and when this page started to die out, suggestions for a replacement for Vin Diesel was made. Norris was the winner by overwhelming margin on write-in votes without even being nominated. The “Vin Diesel Fact Generator” became the “Chuck Norris Fact Generator”, and the rest is history.

The facts soon became an Internet meme, and reached its viewer peak by February 2006. The facts are primarily claims about Norris´ attitude, endurance, masculinity and strength; simply humorous examples about how much of a man Norris is. Due to the popularity of this phenomenon, similar jokes have been created for various fictional characters and other celebrities, such as the Norwegian adventurer Lars Monsen. Chuck Norris ones said that his own favorite quote was “they once tried to carve Chuck Norris´ face into Mount Rushmore, but the granite wasn´t hard enough for his beard”. Others are:

“When the Boogeyman goes to sleep every night, he checks in his closet for Chuck Norris.”

“Chuck Norris doesn´t read books. He stares them down until he gets the information he wants”

http://www.chucknorrisfacts.com

Assignment 5 - Eugene Reznik

This meme is called the successful black man and is a parody of how black people are portrayed in society.  It starts off by saying something stereotypical about black people and then ends with something a black person would not be associated with. It became popular in 2010 and is still popular now. The original photograph of the suit-wearing black man can be found on the stock photo website ShutterStock. The reason it became popular was that most people found the concept entertaining since Americans don’t view the black population as educated and so when this meme was made it kind of contradicted that notion and made it seem as though educated black people are actually the same as white people in society. It didn’t inspire memes but it did inspire videos that related to the meme such as:  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4jjpB-WSPM

Assignment 5 - Cecilie Jenssen

PLANKING

In 2011, a pro-rugby player named David “Wolfman” Williams lay face down on the ground after a try during the Manly-Warringah Sea Eagles vs Newcastle Knights game, which caused the phenomenon “planking” to eventually gain strength. Nevertheless, the term can be traced all the way back to 1994, when a former MTV host and comedian named Tom Green claim to have done a pose that looks like planking in his Canadian local-access TV show. But the term wasn´t known before the New Zealander Paul Carran, reportedly coined the term in 2008. Carran created the term planking after he heard about the “Lying Down Game”, a similar game that friends were playing in the United Kingdom. The “Lying Down Game” began as a Facebook group in 2006, among a couple of friends in the UK. During the summer of 2010 the game got a lot of attention, and people from other countries started to participate, along with people within the UK. According to Google Interest, the interest in "planking" reached its peak in July 2011. 

After Carran introduced the game in 2008, the phenomenon evolved and people created Facebook pages and blogs that they dedicated to images of people “planking”. Within a week the official Facebook page gained as much as 130,000 fans. A couple of rules is created on the official Facebook page, in order to accomplish a successful “planking”. The most important ones is that you lay face down without showing off any facial expressions with your arms placed by your side and your legs straight.

I think this meme became popular because people could participate and post pictures of themselves “planking” different places. The fact that “planking” doesn´t require much skills, may also have affected it´s popularity, allowing everyone to participate. In addition, people might get an adrenalin rush when they find new and challenging places to accomplish a successful “planking”. While other people might see it as pure and simple entertainment to watch other people make a fool of themselves.

According to the dailymail, “unicorning” is the new “planking”. This is a new trend that may have emerged from “planking”, where people post photos of themselves wearing rubber unicorn masks in bizarre settings. 

Assignment 5 - Inga Drågum Hallingbye

“Gingers do have souls”

In 2005, a South Park episode called “ginger kids” used the phrase “gingers have no soul”. In the episode one of the characters held a class presentation regarding “red-headed children” and a so-called disease “gingervitus”.

Five years later in 2010 a red headed boy (username CopperCab) posted a video at Youtube in response, to the phrase “gingers have no soul” he called the video “gingers do have souls”. In this monologue video the boy talks about how he has been bullied and discriminated because of his redheadness at school. The boy’s expressions in the video are clearly showing frustration regarding the topic, redheaded discrimination. The video was posted January 14^th and after a month it had over 3,1 million views (it now has over 3,4 million views). The interest for the video made it´s peak in April. Over 600 people also posted videos in respond to “gingers do have souls”. For example another “famous” Internet video blogger made a video called “leave ginger boy alone” which matched one of his other Youtube “hits” called, “leave britney alone”. The video became so popular that it eventually made South Park (in response to the video), incorporate the “gingers do have souls” monologue into a cartoon parody in promo for it´s new season (season 14). This meant that the boy, CopperCap actually gained profit from his Youtube success. It has also become common to make up pictures with text (macros) containing stuff said and done at the videos mentioned over.

Why I think this video had so much success after it´s release? Many of us are familiar with South Park and have somewhat seen or heard about it´s “ginger kids” jokes and the phrase “gingers have no soul”. Seeing a true red-headed boy stand up against the discrimination of gingers and being completely serious about it might be why this was seen as funny for people to watch. Because the phrases used in both the south park episode, the original video and the South Park promo have become so popular and well known, people have used them in the making of Internet macros. Multiple jokes have now been made about gingers as a result of these videos.

Google insights interest :

http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=gingers+do+have+souls#q=gingers%20do%20have%20souls&cmpt=q

Example macro, someone has used shots from the original video and filled in text to make it funny (left). It also became popular to use other pictures of ginger kids and fill inn “humoristic” text (right). 

This Picture shows CobbCab in the original video and South Parks version in the promo for its 14th season.